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Vivere all’Italiana – Casa Castiglioni

“There has to be irony, both in design and in the objects. I see around me a professional disease of taking everything too seriously. One of my secrets is to joke all the time.”

Achille Castiglioni

This year’s Design Week, June 14-22, 2017, brought Casa Castiglioni to San Francisco, an exhibit that explores the work of one of the greatest industrial designers of the 20th century, Achille Castiglioni. The exhibit showcased nearly 60 years of the Italian designer’s historical objects. Conceived by the Castiglioni Foundation for the 2011 Abitami exhibition in Milan, the exhibit was restaged in Rome, Mantova and Palermo.

Casa Castiglioni - Presentation at IIC SF

The San Francisco exhibit marks the show’s first U.S. appearance. It is one in a series of events as part of the initiative, “Vivere all’Italiana”, developed by the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Education, Economic Development, Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism. In San Francisco, Casa Castiglioni was presented by the Italian Consulate General and San Francisco’s Italian Cultural Institute.

In addition to the exhibition, Achille Castiglioni’s son, Carlo, and daughter, Giovanna, offered an interactive, informative, and thoroughly entertaining presentation describing their father’s designs and decades of innovative products, more aptly described as functional works of art.

Carlo & Giovanna Castiglioni. Photo: Flavia Loreto

Giovanna Castiglioni is president of the Castiglioni Foundation located in Milan.

Included in the presentation was the famous Mezzadro tractor stool, the pivoting Sella saddle stool, the Sanluca armchair, and the Gatto and Taccia table lamps, all striking examples of Castiglioni’s illustrious career during which he designed and collaborated on nearly 150 objects, including lamps, stools, bookshelves, cameras, telephones and vacuum cleaners. Many Castiglioni’s designs are still in production.

Achille Castiglioni was born in Milan in 1918. He graduated from Politecnico di Milano University with a degree in architecture in the late 1930s and, shortly after, set up a design office with his brothers Livio and Pier Giacomo in Milan. He was one of the founding members of the Association for Industrial Design (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale, ADI), established in 1956. After graduating from the Milan Architectural School of the Polytechnic in the late 1930s, the Castiglioni brothers, Livio, Pier Giacomo, and Achille opened an office where they concentrated on designing interiors, exhibition installations, furniture and various objects such as the 1938 Caccia cutlery set. Their 1939 five-value radio receiver, manufactured by Phonola, was considered one of the first radios organically designed and constructed out of plastic.

The designer has won nine “Compasso d′Oro” awards, including a special mention as an individual dedicated to industrial design who, by means of his incomparable experience, “elevated industrial design to the highest levels of culture.”

Achille Castiglioni. Photo courtesy of the Castiglioni Foundation

He fit his designs into categories. The category of Ready-made Objects includes the Mezzadro (1957) stool made from a tractor seat, and the Toio (1962) lamp made from a car reflector. Another group is the Redesigned Objects such as the Cumano (1979) small outdoor café tables, and the Spirale (1971) ashtrays. The Minimalist group includes the Luminator (1955) floor lamp, and the Fuscia (1996) hanging lamp.

In their presentation, Carlo and Giovanna shared how Achille was, on one hand, their father, and on the other, a master of design. They explained that “He left us with a moral obligation to represent his work.” In 2006 they opened the studio as a museum and began to digitize the collection archiving thousands of technical drawings, sketches, prototypes and models. Giovanna explains, “The museum is a special place with a special energy inside. People are welcomed from all over the world, from all walks of life. Visitors can follow the life of a project from beginning to end like a story. It is like keeping the story alive. It’s not like a museum – it’s more like a house.”

At this year’s San Francisco Design Week, where Italy was the main partner country and Carlo and Giovanna Castiglioni had a large space where they rebuilt part of their studio museum with many extraordinary design objects, the Italian Consul General Lorenzo Ortona opened the exhibit together with the Executive Director Dawn Zidonis, recalling how Italy still represents an inspiration worldwide for industrial design and how the link between industrial designers and artisans all over Italy is still very strong. “We are partnering with San Francisco because we believe that Italy can build strong relations with the Capital of World Innovation in this field as well, we are here because we believe in our partnership and on the growth of San Francisco in the field of Industrial Design where Italy has a long and extraordinary history.”

Castiglioni’s works are found in permanent collections in museums all around the world, including 14 pieces at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Others are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Kunstgewerbe-Museum, Zurich; the Staatliches Museum für Kunst, Munich; the Uneleckoprumyslove Museum, Prague; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.